Simmons named their flagship mattress “Beautyrest,” and the image they likely sought to create was that a good night’s rest maintains, or maybe even creates, one’s personal beauty.  I’ve discovered that the words “beauty” and “rest” go together naturally as cause and effect.  When you are exposed to beauty and allow yourself to stop and take it in, it puts mind, soul, and body at rest.  My recent trip to Orcas Island proved that to me again.

In my first post from the island, I spoke of the tears that welled up in my eyes as I stopped to take in the beauty of the paradisaical setting on which my brother and sister-in-law had placed their loving and creative hands: Bluebell Springs.  True creativity is one of the aspects of human life that offer profound evidence for being made in God’s image.  The Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev adds this insight:

When a man is enjoying the satisfaction of his greed or vanity, he ought to feel the poison and be reminded of the original sin.  But when he is enjoying the creative act which reveals truth or creates beauty or radiates love upon a fellow creature, he recalls paradise. . . .

The ethics of creativeness can alone save the soul from being warped by arid abstract virtue and abstract ideals transformed into rules and norms.  The ideas of truth, goodness, and beauty must cease to be norms and rules and become vital forces, an inner creative fire.

I think Berdyaev’s reference to paradise is not only logically apropos, but biblically appropriate as well.  I spoke a few posts ago about Genesis 2:9 which mentions the trees of man’s first paradise as being beautiful before it refers to their being useful.  This mention of beauty and paradise is then repeated in reference to the monumental culminating act of our Creator coming again to make his dwelling with mankind: “I [John in the Revelation] saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev. 21:2).  So beauty is another one of the bookends of the Bible—appearing in both the first and last of human paradises: paradise lost and paradise regained.

George MacDonald once stopped on a frigid day to muse on beauty when he saw ice crystals that had formed on a puddle:

I wondered over again, for the hundredth time, what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of nature, always kept it beautiful.  The beauty of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I thought.  Because our God is so free from stain, so loving, so unselfish, so good, so altogether what He wants us to be, so holy therefore all His works declare Him in beauty; His fingers can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness; and even the play of his elements is in grace and tenderness of form.

One evening at Bluebell Springs I was down where the land drops off sharply to the shoreline rocks below, when a rapid movement caught my attention: one of the swallows that had been snatching insects in the meadow behind me had followed some avian urge to dive over the grassy ledge and then sketch a grand arc of some two hundred yards over the gently pulsing surface of the Georgia Strait and then just as quickly speed back to his work.

I’m convinced that this flight was not only a celebration of life, but also a celebration of beauty—one of many such celebrations that helped to put my mind, body, and soul at rest.

See you outdoors!

Dean

FOR beauty being the best of all we know

Sums up the unsearchable and secret aims

Of nature, and on joys whose earthly names

Were never told can form and sense bestow;

And man has sped his instinct to outgo

The step of science; and against her shames

Imagination stakes out heavenly claims,

Building a tower above the head of woe.

Nor is there fairer work for beauty found

Than that she win in nature her release

From all the woes that in the world abound;

Nay with his sorrow may his love increase,

If from man’s greater need beauty redound,

And claim his tears for homage of his peace.

-Robert Bridges